Shabuya - La Mirada

A post shared by MonsterMunching (@monstermunching_oc) on Nov 14, 2017 at 3:06pm PST

There’s regular shabu-shabu restaurants, and then there’s Shabuya—an all-you-can-eat buffet of all the things you ever want to boil, simmer, and swish in your own roiling vat of flavorful liquid. It’s a fondue festival; hot-pot heaven; and I wouldn’t have known it existed if our good friends—who live in North OC—didn’t take us here to La Mirada to treat us for my birthday.

Yes, I know there are others like it, but having never been to one, I never imagined how well it worked or how much I would enjoy myself. For $26.99 per head during dinner time (and $18.99 lunch), we had the run of the place, but especially the buffet line. It took multiple return trips to try every single one of the meatballs and fish balls and fish cakes they had, which, to me, are just as good as the paper-thin shavings of meat.

And there were all the vegetables. Oh, so many vegetables. Imagine a salad bar where all the produce is designed to be wilted in hot broth. It started with the basics of Napa cabbage and bok choy, and blossomed to nearly every type of mushrooms known to science, kimchi, and at least three kinds of onion.

A saucing station had every permutation of spicy, sweet, sour, savory, and even an egg sauce whose white color and thick viscosity reminded me of a vanilla milk shake. There’s seafood too, all meant to be boiled in the broth along with everything else, including crawfish, blue crabs, and, best of all, sea scallops so sweet and briny I think I more than recouped my admission price by eating at least a dozen.

And then, of course, there’s the meat, which exists in various grades of marbling from all parts of the Wagyu cow. There were other proteins, such as chicken and lamb, but the tenderest and most mouth-melting was the beef. You’re allowed to order three plates of it at a time. But we ended up with twice that at one point. And as we swished, dipped, and ate, over and over, everything blurred so that we lost track of what cut was currently falling apart in our mouths.

It almost didn’t matter what flavor of broth we chose either. It was at that moment I realized where I was: shabu-shabu Shangri-La-Mirada!

Shabuya
15028 Rosecrans Ave.
La Mirada, CA 90638
(657)529-1290

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